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In Genetics and Reproductive Risk Can having children be immoral LM Purdy discusses the notion that the recent advances in reproductive technology impose a moral obligation on individuals to prevent the birth of affected babies that will not have a minimally satisfying life There are however several assumptions that the author makes in reaching the conclusion that having affected children is immoral The author makes the claim that people with Huntingtons disease are unlikely to live a minimally satisfying life It is known however that Huntingtons disease does not take any affect until 40-50 years of age Thus those 40-50 years can easiliy be lived the same without the affects of the disease as those individuals who are not affected with Huntingtons disease Just as those without the disease have a satisfying life before the age of 50 so can those with Huntingtons Thus there whole life is not doomed to be unsatisfying If questioned many individuals would chose only 40-50 of a good disease free life than no life at all When the author states that is unacceptable to accept the risk of inheriting this disease with the consent of the future child the author fails to recognize that essentially all actions performed by the surrogate mother are done without consent This includes drinking alcohol and smoking While these behaviors are harmful in large amounts they are not monitored by a third party nor have proven to cause enough damage in small amounts so the life of the child would be unsatifying Thus the mother is accepting a risk on behalf of another yet while it may be considered immoral to drink or smoke in the first place it should not considered immoral to have the child If pretanal testing is used in order to prevent mothers from having affected children because it is immoral to accept the risk one could extend this argument to monitoring a mothers alcohol and nicotine consumption which would

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